


The Ghosts of Barts

by captainofthegreenpeas



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gothic theme, Mollcroft, Molly Hooper Appreciation, Post-Reichenbach, Religious References, Romance, Supernatural Elements, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-19 02:22:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9413654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainofthegreenpeas/pseuds/captainofthegreenpeas
Summary: Molly pays the debt for the dead, but the living brother is the one who haunts.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cocohorse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cocohorse/gifts).



> The “Barts tradition” does not exist. I made it up for lolz. Barts DOES have five chapels. I made up the sixth chapel bit, but the location was inspired by Abominable Bride’s Victorian!morgue.

Molly Hooper had never been afraid of the dark. There was something peaceful in the total absence of light and sound. It was comforting, to sink into it like deep water, let it over wash over her and slowly engulf her. 

The fear of the unknown did not unnerve her. Whatever monsters were lurking in the dark, she could not see them- but they could not see  _her._ Fighting was never an option, for Molly; and when it came to flight, she would prefer to hide and calmly slip away on small silent feet than to be chased and feel despair close around her as almost inevitably, she was outrun. 

Once; and only once, there had been a power cut at the morgue. It was just after midnight and for the brief moment before the emergency lighting came on, Molly was all alone, in the dark, still touching the fresh corpse of a homicide victim. That moment was the stuff of nightmares and the room was still eerie when the emergency lighting came on for a few seconds before power was restored. But Molly, who rehearsed conversations in her head (not that it ever did her much good once the actual conversation started) had simply waited calmly, not even taking her hand off the cadaver. Once the lights were on, she resumed her post-mortem as if nothing had happened. 

Two hours later she went home and screamed her head off at the sight of a spider in her bathtub.

So Molly did not feel afraid that evening, even among the ghosts of Barts. There were no real ghosts, of course. Not even here, in the sixth and least of the hospital’s chapels, the windowless cavern in the oldest wing. Thanks to no lightbulbs that could be relied upon to work without blinking and blowing, there was too little light and too many graves underfoot overflowing with skeletons. Small wonder that chaplain, staff, patients and visitors alike all shunned the place, favouring the other five chapels and the large multi-faith prayer room upstairs. The more it was shunned, the more desolate it became. The more desolate it became, the less it appealed and the more it was shunned. But the chapel could always depend on one visitor, to see that the tradition was upheld. For as long as there had been a morgue in the hospital, every dead body that passed through it had one candle lit and left to burn itself out. No more, no less. Regardless of who the deceased had been, what they had done in life or why they were there, they had their candle in the sixth and least chapel. Some claimed the candles represented the torches of each soul, leading them to the afterlife. The superstitious insisted that the candles must not be snuffed out, health and safety be damned. The candles, they said, were the fiery sentinels of the dead. If the candle blew out before a soul completed its journey (at which point the candle would burn out naturally) the dead one would be lost, never to be at peace. So it was Molly’s unofficial duty to light the candles, in order to prevent the haunting of Barts- and patient dissatisfaction.

For all that she allowed Sherlock to pinch spare body parts from the lab, Molly did respect the dead. For some of the lonely corpses, it was the only mourning they ever got. She lit the candles for all of them. The candle for the friend Sherlock had whipped the day he met John had long since guttered out. The tattooed smugglers had their candles side by side into the darkness. The speckled blonde’s smooth cream candle melted gracefully away. On Christmas Day, she had buried her feelings to light a candle for not-her-face woman. Sherlock’s doppelganger had his candle; and it burned like all the rest, keeping the secret. _He was Moriarty’s big mistake, not I. If he hadn’t had him killed, I wouldn’t have been able to body-swap._

She thought of Moriarty, of Jim from IT. There had been no candle for him, for his body had been referred to a different morgue before he reached the basement. _Would I light a candle for him? To see that he never returned to haunt us?_ For Jim from IT, she might. But he had never existed, not really. Jim, who read her blog. Jim, who stroked her cat. Jim, who she introduced to _Glee._ Bloody _Glee_. She wasn’t sure whether it was hilarious or horrifying. _He was kind to me. How could someone so depraved be so good at kindness?_ Molly supposed she would never know.

Molly dispelled the thought of him from her mind as she scraped the finished candle stubs out of their holders and put them aside, to be recycled, replacing them with fresh ones. Four candles were still burning, three of them less than an inch from their ends, about to tip her into total darkness. Molly lit a taper from the tallest candle and touched it to the wicks of the new candles in turn. The room brightened as the little grains of fire clung like inverted tears and grew upwards. Her nose tingled as she leaned over them, breathing in the warm thick scent mingling with the damp. Holding the last candle, she dropped the taper into the fire bucket. The moment it touched the sand the tap of an umbrella against the floor shot through her, shattering her peace and throwing her into a panic.

She whirled around. Her eyes registered a stranger in the shadows. Molly’s hand closed instinctively around the stand, the flames quivering in fear. _I know this place better than they do,_ she thought. _If I can knock the candles to the floor before they find the light switch, I can make good my escape._

“We may speak freely here, regarding our mutual friend,” Mycroft’s voice emanated from somewhere near the door. “Nobody is listening in but the dead. They’re not talkative.”

“We almost found out,” Molly mumbled under her breath, realising how close she had been to violating the tradition. Oh, what did it matter anyway. It was only superstition. Mycroft walked over to her as if she had been waiting for him, which was nonsense. He had never come to her before, not alone. She was always the one picked up without warning, like a leaf in the whirlwind that was the Holmes world.

Molly watched him carefully, turning the candle end over end in her hands.  “How is he?” She asked. “Our mutual friend.”

“Alive and kicking. Which is more than can be said of Dr Watson.”

“He’s dead?!” Molly squeaked.

“No need to be alarmed, I was not clear. I was referring to the ‘kicking’ part. Though given the opportunity I am sure he would gladly kick _me_.”

“Oh, thank god.” Molly’s heart resumed beating. “I was worried. He’s tried to call me… but I can’t… and if he killed himself…”

“Indeed. We could have had a real-life enactment of _Romeo and Juliet_ on our hands.”

Molly nodded, surprised in her sudden shock at the fitting comparison.

“Rest assured, I have not been entirely idle. I took the precaution of confiscating Dr Watson’s handgun the day of the fall and he has returned to the simpering company of his therapist, on pain of having his TV licence cancelled. He detests me for it of course, but that can’t be helped considering how he already blames me for indirectly pushing Sherlock off that roof.” Mycroft’s face screwed up in what Molly thought was disgust until she corrected herself- regret; and because of the regret, pain. “Truth be told, I am somewhat disappointed that he so easily believed my lies about selling my brother to Moriarty for a code I obviously wouldn’t believe existed.”

“Anderson’s been acting very strangely,” Molly confided. “About the fall. He keeps coming up with theories about Sherlock might have faked it. He said he wanted to set up some kind of club for it and I think he’s _serious_. There isn’t something you could do to stop him, is there? If it gets out that-“

“We will do what we always do. Dismiss it as the preposterous ravings of conspiracy theorists. Whatever truth they stumble upon in the dark will be tarred for the company it keeps. Anderson may be enough to make sceptics forget that the truth is often stranger than the myth. That could make him useful.”

“It’s not just about the secret, he- he feels guilty. I thought maybe going to the funeral might give him closure, but apparently he didn’t go.”

“Hmm, yes.” Mycroft frowned. Molly watched the light shift across his face as he did so, new shadows fading, making him look more stern and gaunt than ever. “That would be my doing.”

“What?”

“He and Sergeant Donovan turned up at Sherlock’s funeral. To pay their respects, they said. I told them they had none in his life, so they had nothing to pay and I was not inclined to allow them to be a nuisance to Sherlock in death as well as life. They left in disgrace.”

“ _Mycroft,_ ” Molly breathed in astonishment. “That was _cruel_.”

“As far as the world is concerned, my brother threw himself from the roof of this very hospital in front of his best friend because of lies that both of them helped to spread. I have buried a brother I have known and loved from the first day to the last. It was unreasonable of me to lash out the two of them, I admit, but I’m reliably informed that’s what emotions do. It was necessary to act the part of the bereaved.”

“That wasn’t acting.”

“Perhaps there was more method than acting in that piece of method acting,” Mycroft admitted. “But it was convincing; and that was all it needed to be.”

He held out his hand. Molly placed the unlit candle in it. It was warm from her palm. Silently, she picked up one flickering candle and tipped it to press the heads of their candles together. A hush fell upon them as they became transfixed, watching the flame pass from hers to his. He placed it next to hers on the stand almost reverently.

“I miss him.” She wasn’t sure why she was whispering.

“As do I.” His voice in turn was quiet. “But, although the circumstances were unusual and  unfortunate, I am glad to have furthered our… acquaintance, in the course of events.”

The shadows were playing across his face, shifting each time the candles flickered. His pupils had fully dilated, which didn’t surprise her. Hers had too. It was very dark in here, after all. It felt as if somehow they had left their physical bodies at the door and they were communicating through some different plane.

“I fear that I have not fully thanked you, for all that I owe to you.” He had moved slightly closer to her.

“Oh, you’ve said thank you. Many times. Not- not aloud. But you’ve thanked me.” He observed her, making deductions from every etching on her face, every facet of her hair, every stitch of her clothing. His deductions were complete, as always. Yet his mind kept drawing him back to irrelevant details. The tilt of her nose. The dimple in her cheek. The curve of her ear. There were no useful deductions to be made there, but his mind kept taking him back to them. Must be the dark.

She was right, ultimately. They had told each other so much without a word. Molly liked that about them. Her face could often express her feelings much better than her words.

“That was my intention. I do not like to leave a debt unpaid-“

“There was never any debt.”

Mycroft looked, for a moment, baffled. “You were there, when we needed you most, you risked-“

“No, really, I’m not expecting some heroic reward. I’m just a local pathologist, that’s all.”

“And I’m just a minor official in Her Majesty’s Civil Service,” Mycroft remarked dryly. “Look at us both.”

 _I am_ Molly thought. _I can’t look at anything else. The more I look at you, the harder it is to look away._

She knew she must look silly, gawping at him like this, drinking in the sarcastic set of his mouth, his steady solemn gaze on hers, the cold sweep of forehead, that strange stubborn curl of his. But she seemed to have left her self-consciousness at the door.

“What do I owe you, Molly Hooper?” He asked her and to Molly it sounded like the closest Mycroft Holmes would ever get to a prayer.

“You owe me nothing.” She pledged, not sure if she was saying this to Mycroft or the dead.

“If I owe you nothing; and you owe me nothing, then what is this?”

Molly’s mind flew through all that had happened, all that had been said and not said, done and not done all the way back to the start of this dance.

“A gift.” Before she could explain what she was doing, Molly leaned on tiptoe and kissed the end of Mycroft’s long nose. Were it not for his hyper awareness, Mycroft might have missed his eyes closing and then opening within a millisecond of her own, or the almost imperceptible stretch his fingertips made towards her.

The candles stood witness, all those blinking eyes, as she stepped back, eyes on the grave beneath her feet.

“I’m glad,” he said tightly. “That we have reached an understanding.” Holding on to his umbrella, he walked on and at some point in her numbness his silent feet had crossed the threshold, rejoining the outside world and leaving Molly to the ghosts.


End file.
